Using Tailwind for Instagram To Beat The Algorithm

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Since many of you post travel photos on Instagram and often use the platform for blogging, landing freelance work, or to support your resume for your work + travel lifestyle, I have to share with you the exciting new update that Tailwind (a scheduling app for Pinterest and Instagram) came out with that helps you find the best hashtags for your posts!

Seriously. This is something I’ve been looking for for ages. Okay, maybe not ages, that’s a little dramatic. Ever since Instagram rolled out the algorithm years ago that shows posts in a non-chronological feed (I’m certain there’s at least, like, 50% of people I follow who haven’t showed up in my feed since then), hashtags are more important now than they ever were.

Since hashtags allow your post to be seen by people who aren’t already following you (new potential readers/clients/leads), it’s always a good idea to include the right ones in your Instagram posts.

The other day, I was talking to one of my blogger friends who is in a different niche than travel. I mentioned my number of comments/likes has stayed about the same despite doubling my following (real people, no fake followers) yet her engagement was through the roof. We’re talking 12k followers with 1-3k likes per post! I asked her if she did anything unique, and she said not really, but hashtags really work for her.

She opened up the Instagram Insights tab on her account (this shows the data for business profiles) and her hashtag reach was over 3,000 people on a post. I pulled mine up, and guess what? My hashtag reach was 34 people. 34! It’s almost comical how low that is considering I had 25 hashtags on that post. Yes. Comical.

Since then I’ve been on the hunt for a way to weed out the hashtags that aren’t working, and discover the ones that will help me reach a new potential audience who may love my content.

Instead of scouring the Instagram app for hours going through hashtags and guessing whether they’d work, I saw Tailwind’s update that shows hashtag suggestions based on your photo caption and are color-coded to show their strength. (I’ll explain more in a bit.)

How have I been using Tailwind?Tailwind is a robust scheduling app that I’ve been using to schedule my Pinterest content for years. Tailwind helped me grow my Pinterest account from 300 followers to 4,400+ with 450,000+ monthly viewers. I love it so much, that I even joined Tailwind’s affiliate/referral program and mentioned its benefits on my “How to Start a Travel Blog” post.

Anyways! I hadn’t used Tailwind’s Instagram scheduler yet because I didn’t think I needed it to be completely honest.

However, now that I’ve actually seen and used the Hashtag Finder tool, I know it’s going to come in handy as I aim to increase my Instagram reach with hashtags.

According to Tailwind, here’s what’s new:

- Get a fresh selection of hashtags for every post, every time.- Hashtag suggestions now appear and refresh as you type, whether you include hashtags or not!- Find even more hashtags by shuffling them or quickly dismissing the ones that aren’t quite right.- Hover over any hashtag to see how popular it is so you can quickly pick the best ones for you.

Here’s a video from Tailwind showing how it works (it’s as easy as it looks!):

Here is a screenshot of me testing it out - I haven’t written out the actual caption yet; I simply wrote “bali” (the location of the image) and got SO many hashtag ideas, many of which I hadn’t used before!

The free trial for Pinterest includes up to 100 free scheduled pins and 30 scheduled posts for Instagram. I’m still on the free trial with Instagram (I’ve paid for Pinterest for years now) and after testing out the hashtag finder tool it’s very likely that I’ll upgrade once I hit the 30 post maximum.

Let me know if you try this out as well, and if you have any extra tips for boosting your reach on Instagram!